What with good roads, the radio, and better schools and more of them the
scene is rapidly changing in the Blue Ridge Country.
The little one-room log school is almost a thing of the past. Only in
remote sections can it be found. No longer is the mountain child
retarded by the bridgeless stream, for good roads have come to the
mountains and with them the catwalk--an improvised bridge of barrel
hoops strung together with cables--spanning the creek has passed. The
mountain mother's warning is heard no longer. "Mind, Johnny, you don't
swing the bridge." Concrete pillars support steel girders that span the
creek high above even the highest flood point. Education soars high in
the southern mountain region. Instead of a few weeks of school there are
months now, and what is more Johnny doesn't walk to school any more. The
county school bus, operated by a careful driver, picks him up almost at
his very door and brings him back safely when school turns out in the
evening. Instead of the poorly lighted one-room school, there is the
consolidated school built of native stone, with many windows and
comfortable desks. If the mountain boy or girl fails to get an education
it is his own fault. There is a central heating system and the teacher,
you may be sure, is a graduate of an accredited college. The _Kentucky
Progress Magazine_ of Winter, 1935, gives a remarkable example of what
is taking place in an educational way in the mountain region:
"Twenty-nine well-equipped, accredited four-year high schools and two
junior colleges now dot the five counties, Lawrence, Johnson, Martin,
Floyd, and Pike ... seven high schools and one junior college have the
highest rating possible, membership in the Southern Association of
Colleges and Secondary Schools.... The advent of surfaced roads has made
successful consolidation possible in many instances."
Preceding the consolidated school an inestimable service has been
rendered the children of the southern highlands by means of the
settlement school. It would be impossible to discuss them all
adequately, but of the outstanding ones of which I have personal
knowledge are: that great institution at Berea, Kentucky, the Hindman
Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky; the Martha Berry School in
the mountains of Georgia; the agricultural school of Sergeant Alvin C.
York near Jamestown, Tennessee; and the John C. Campbell Folk School at
Brasstown, N. C.
Under efficient guidance mountain boys and girls are taught to preserve
the handicrafts of their forbears, knitting, spinning, weaving, making
of dyes, and even a pastime once indulged in by boys and men--whittling.
Idle whittling has been converted into not only an artistic craft, but a
profitable one. Nowhere in the country is there to be found a finer
collection of whittled figures, ranging from tiny chicks to squirrels,
rabbits, birds, than those made by the mountain youths at the John C.
Campbell Folk School.
Perhaps no greater service is being rendered mountain folk than that
headed by Sergeant York in his agricultural school, because he is of the
mountains and knows well the need of his people.
But even before the settlement school had been thoroughly rooted there
was the Moonlight School of Rowan County, Kentucky, for adult
illiterates. It was a great, a magnificent undertaking by a mountain
woman--Mrs. Cora Wilson Stewart, born in Rowan County. She had been a
teacher in the wretched, poorly lighted one-room log school. Becoming
county superintendent, she set about to lead out of ignorance and
darkness the adult illiterates of her county. Happily she had been
preceded in such an undertaking by a pioneer teacher in rugged Hocking
County, Ohio, in the days of the Civil War. There Miss Kate Smith,
scarcely in her teens, who saw her brothers shoulder their muskets and
march off to the Civil War, took upon herself the task of teaching,
first, a bound boy, an orphan lad bound by the state to a farmer. The
lad later became a stowaway in a covered wagon in which the young
teacher and her parents rode west. This lad in his teens was only one of
many adult illiterates taught by the Ohio woman and her plan proved that
it could be done. That boy, William Wright, became a Judge of the Court
of Appeals.
With book-learning have come many broadening factors in the life of the
southern mountaineer. His sons attend agricultural college, his
daughters are active workers in the 4-H clubs. They return to the
hillside farm to show their mothers how best to can fruit. The boys have
learned how to improve and conserve the soil, how to save forests. The
consolidated school has taught mountain children to mix with others.
They have Girl Scout groups and Boy Scout groups; they learn
self-government under trained leaders.
Above all, book-learning is swiftly wiping out the old suspicions and
superstitions about the medical profession. Time was when there was but
one doctor in all of Leslie County, Kentucky. Mountain mothers relied on
the old midwife; infant mortality was appalling. Then came the Frontier
Nursing School headed by Mrs. Mary Breckinridge. Her work is known
throughout the breadth of the nation. The Frontier Nursing Service has
the support of the leading people of the nation. Debutantes gladly give
up a life of frivolity and ease to become trained in obstetrics and give
their services to helping mountain mothers and babies. Its purpose was
to combat the infant death rate in remote Kentucky mountain sections.
The nurses ride on horseback and visit and care for mountain mothers.
Mrs. Breckinridge herself was a nurse during the World War in France and
went back to the Scottish Highlands--from which her kinsman Alexander
Breckinridge came to settle in the Shenandoah in 1728--where she became
a midwife.
Mountain folk usually are slow to take on new ways. But the wonders
wrought through the Frontier Nursing Service they have "seen with their
own eyes."
Learning has brought about a great change for the better in the life of
the mountain woman. Once we saw her lank, slatternly, meek,
stoic--mother of a dozen or more, obeying with patient fortitude the
will of her man. We saw too the pitiable child-bride marrying perhaps a
man three times her age because he could take care of her. There being
so many in the family Pappy and Mammy were glad to be rid of one of
their flock. Though both pictures were often as overdrawn as that evoked
by a daughter of the Blue Ridge--a whimsical picture of a pretty maid in
full-skirted crinoline with a soft southern accent--moonlight and
honeysuckle, a gallant, goateed colonel paying court to her charm and
beauty while he sips a mint julep. This picture and that of the
snaggle-toothed mountain woman in bedraggled black calico can no more be
taken for fact than that Jesse James is still holding up stagecoaches or
that cowboys in high boots and leather breeches are daily wedding the
rich easterners' daughters who have come West.
There are well-organized centers: weaving centers that market the wares
of mountain women all over the nation; music centers and recreational
centers. Women and their daughters are better dressed and certainly they
give more care to their appearance than the mountain woman did when she
rode to the county seat on court day with a basket of eggs and butter
and ginseng on one arm and a baby on the other.
She still knits and crochets and hooks rugs--not from leavings of the
family's wearing clothes--but from leavings she buys from the mills. She
does not have to take her wares to the county seat--today she stretches
up a clothesline across the front stoop, pins her rugs and lace on the
line, and the passing motorist buys all that her busy hands can make.
The question is often asked: How does the mountain woman regard her
right to vote? Generally she is unconcerned with the vote. But as time
goes on, by reason of the many factors that enter into her new way of
living, she is evidencing more interest, both in the county and state
elections. Strangely enough, though the mountain woman went hesitantly
to the polls, a Kentucky mountain woman, Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery, of
Elliott County, was the first woman to be elected to the legislature
south of the Mason and Dixon line. She was self-educated and for a
number of years was rural correspondent for newspapers, which experience
perhaps gave her a broad understanding of political matters and the
incentive to enter the field. Hers was a distinctive service to the
commonwealth and particularly to her sisters of the southern highlands,
inasmuch as she was first of her sex to actually voice before a
legislature the problems and needs of the mountain woman.
Today with rural electrification the mountain woman ceases to be a
drudge. She is on a par with her sister of the level land.
She no longer stumbles wearily to the barn after dark with a battered
lantern, its chimney blackened with smoke. She has only to switch on a
light and turn to milking. Or if her household has progressed to dairy
farming, as many of them have, finding the sale of milk to the city
creameries more profitable than raising vegetables, she has only to
attach the electric devices and the cows are milked mechanically. She
sits no more at the churn, one hand gripping the dasher, the other
holding a fretful babe to her breast. Now that unseen juice, or
'lectric, comes along the wire and into the new churn and there! Almost
before you know it there is a plump roll of butter.
The whole family benefits from rural electrification. The youngest girl
of the household is not reminded of the irksome task of cleaning and
filling the lamps, trimming the wicks. What if the single bulb swinging
from the middle of the ceiling is fly-specked! It still gives ample
light for the room. The hazard of the overturned oil lamp and the fear
of burning the house down are gone too. "I'd druther have 'lectric than
a new cookstove or a saddle mare," any mountain woman will tell you.
She is through with the back-breaking battling trough and the washboard.
Her proudest possession and the greatest labor-saving device on the
place is the electric washer. Carefully covered with a clean piece of
bleach, it holds a distinguished place in the corner of the dining room
when not in use. It is the first thing to be exhibited to the visitor.
But whenever progress brings, it likewise takes away.
The fireside gathering where the glowing logs provided light and cheer
for the family circle, conducive to story and riddle and song, has
almost reached the vanishing point. Instead, the young folks pile into
the second-hand Ford and whiz off to town. They don't wait for court
week, when in other days the courthouse yard was the market place of the
hillsman. Though the old courthouse still stands as it did in early
days, the scene has changed. There is one ancient seat of justice in the
Big Sandy country within sight of the spot where the first settlers
built their fort for safety against Indian attack, and over the door
these words catch the eye--